may have to do with the fact that "our forefathers, the whole Middle Ages, thanks to the effect of German propensities on Europe, were given to drink; Middle Ages—that phrase signifies the alcoholic poisoning of Europe."[1] So fearfulness, from which so much evil comes in the world, is before all a physiological state.[2] Even the mental and moral disposition of those to whom the ascetic priest ministers may be explained physiologically; their "sinfulness" may be not so much fact, as an interpretation of fact, namely physiological depression.[3] For a similar reason the views of old age should not be treated too reverentially, even when they are those of a philosopher, nor are we to give too much weight to the judgments we form at the end of the day: fatigue and weariness may be unconsciously reflected in them.[4] Morality itself may have a varying tinge according to physiological conditions: the morality of increasing nerve-force is joyous and restless; that of diminishing nerve-force—in the evening or in the case of the sick or the aged—is of a passive, expectant, sad, or even gloomy character.[5] Philosophy may also vary, according as it springs from a deficiency or from a superabundance of life-energy. Every philosophy which ranks peace higher than war, every ethics which has a negative conception of happiness, every metaphysics and physics which recognizes a finale, some kind of an ultimate state, every predominant æsthetic or religious longing for an apart, beyond, without, above, allows us to raise the question whether it was not sickness that inspired the philosopher. Indeed the unconscious disguising of physiological needs under the mantle of the objective, the ideal, and the purely spiritual goes shockingly far, and Nietzsche says that he has often asked himself whether, broadly speaking, philosophy has not been principally hitherto an interpretation of the body—and a misunderstanding of the body.[6]
